If you want a lighter-colored gefilte fish, use white potatoes. Other good choices are Yukon Gold or Yellow Finn potatoes. It has the right amount of starch and moisture content to produce a firm but tender potato ball that will absorb the broth and flavors of the fish. This is not quite the mighty gefilte fish of family legend, but it does justice to the Passover staple and then some. The traditional potato for gefilte fish is the Idaho potato. The fish is aggressively seasoned with salt, white pepper, onions, and parsnip for an overall savory slant, but this is well-balanced by a measured amount of sugar and nutmeg. I still love the store-bought stuff, but nothing compares to the subtle complexity of homemade. It even managed to convert a few life-long gefilte fish haters in my midst. You can make everything ahead of time and just reheat the gefilte fish for your guests. These fish can be sliced and set out with various accouterment on a platter as an appetizer. For a more informal, whimsical approach, you can form the mousse into 4 large fish-shaped pieces and poach them whole. The recipe makes a lot of mousse, so ask a friend or two to help you shape the quenelles. Forming the mixture into the traditional loaves (quenelles) between two spoons makes serving individual portions simple. How you want to shape the mousse is up to you. I set out to make it myself, confident that a homemade version would help me defend and promote the reputation of this deeply unpopular dish that I hold so dear. But how complicated could it really be to make? Stripped down, gefilte fish is basically a dense fish mousse poached in stock made from the fish bones. Then there’s Harold Closter, my Dad’s grade school pal, who wrote an oft-remembered essay in the second grade about a Jewish Eskimo who left home to hunt the mighty gefilte fish- sort of a Jewish Moby Dick, apparently.Īll of this family lore compounded in my mind to elevate gefilte fish to near mythical status. The house would smell of fish for a whole day, my mom recalls. My grandmother made it at home, chopping the fish by hand in a huge wooden bowl and tasting the mixture raw to adjust seasoning. My love for store-bought gefilte fish continues to this day, but the gefilte lore of my childhood has been calling out to me in adulthood. I’d eat it any and all ways: warm, on matzoh with horseradish, or cold straight out of the fridge. As a kid I’d hungrily look forward to Passover, when my mom would buy jars of the lumpy beige fish loaves and doctor it up on the stove with some onions and carrots. But the real object of my desire for all things gilled is gefilte fish. Heaven is a bowl of creamed herring and onions. If anything betrays my Ashkenazi Jewish heritage-besides the Casper-the-friendly-ghost-like skin tone-it’s my love of fishy fish.
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